Eye candy from Bright Star Monitor South

Posted by Matthew Templeton on November 19, 2012 - 9:10am

At the moment, I'm taking a short break from doing some programming and beta testing for our latest AAVSOnet telescope to come online, Bright Star Monitor - South. This is a twin of the Bright Star Monitor that ran in New Mexico for the past few years, but installed on the opposite side of the world. BSM-South is hosted by Peter Nelson (NLX) a few dozen miles east of Melbourne, Australia, and has been operating in a "hands-on" capacity for several months now.

Peter and Arne developed the system and data pipeline to the point where data could get from Peter's place to AAVSO headquarters automatically. I've had it on my plate for the past few weeks to take the system the rest of the way, making it a fully automated member of AAVSOnet with automatic data processing and distribution of data. We're almost there, and a few more days of keeping an eye on output logs should be all it takes to turn the key on automated nightly processing. Doc Kinne and I have the processing pipeline developed well enough that it didn't take too much modification to get to this point; while it hasn't exactly been "plug and play" simple on our end, it's pretty close. That's always been a goal of mine since Arne handed off a spec of the data processing a few years ago, and my hope is that the systems will become even simpler to integrate as we move forward.

In the meantime, one of the pleasures of working with the automated pipeline is to get to look over the images that get passed to our Telescope Advocates every day that data comes in. This one of S Doradus sure caught my eye! I look forward to seeing more images from this little telescope very soon.